How to Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman – review

This chilly, efficient thriller is refreshingly difficult to classify. The unnamed Scandinavian setting has all the familiar elements of contemporary northern lights noir, yet its claustrophobic, interior-driven narrative harks back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's disturbing feminist classic The Yellow Wallpaper, or even Ibsen's A Doll's House.

Marta has been married to Hector for many years. He is much older, a teacher; she stays at home obsessively cleaning, cooking, ensuring the house is kept the way Hector demands it. Their only child, Kylan, has recently moved from their remote valley to the city, where he works in a bank.

Marta has been in the grip of something terrifying and intangible since her son's departure. She is inured to a rigid, numbing daily routine that has been determined by Hector, punctuated by the small pink pills she takes to maintain an even keel. These she has begun, disobediently, to pretend to swallow. Her current actions, bold by her timid standards, surprise her. She has started smoking, furtively, concealing cigarettes under the mattress of the bed. Hector would forbid them. Her silent collaborator in this, egging her on, is the young teenage girl she glimpses, at first intermittently, then with increasing frequency. Blonde, skinny, wearing too-small pyjamas patterned with pink hearts, she has black smudged eyeliner and raw, bitten fingernails. Phantom, hallucination or repressed memory? When Marta met Hector she was also on the brink of adulthood, just 18. For their wedding, Hector's disapproving mother gave her new daughter-in-law a manual entitled How to Be a Good Wife. Its bland yet double-edged maxims litter the book like warning notes in Bluebeard's castle.

Marta can remember little of her life before Hector. They met, apparently, on holiday. Hector saved Marta from drowning. Accident or attempted suicide? According to his version, and what she vaguely remembers, her parents had died not long before in a car accident. Marta was almost demented with grief; Hector, and his instructions never to stray beyond the valley, keeps her safe.

The novel is Chapman's debut, and is eerily well-handled. The most ambiguous passage, a set-piece in the middle of the book, is a ghastly dinner party that could be a scene from Festen, and follows Marta's disintegration over the course of an evening. Kylan has brought his girlfriend, Katya, to meet the family, including Hector's mother. Marta, who is drunk, displays the spiteful irrationality of a jealous, overbearing parent faced with a rival. Hector, by contrast, is reason and understanding. A few pages previously, everything about him – his key in the door at an unusual time, his photographs of female former students, and his "wet, heavy" touch – had screamed foreboding. Now it is she who appears unreliable. Amid this menace, Chapman shows real empathy for loneliness and the cruelty of ageing, from the "small white face" of Marta's wristwatch, to Hector's stoop and thinning hair, Marta's revulsion at her body, its "drooping breasts like rat's noses". That startling, unpleasant image reignites the uncertainty and fear that rise in Marta like bile, as her fragmented memories struggle to focus.

It is sufficient to say that Marta, by the novel's end, achieves a pyrrhic victory out of unlikely circumstances. Chapman's own achievement is to have created a plausible tale of trauma, a ruthless examination of the many layers of marriage, and a woman's opaque role within it.